Eye Of The Beholder

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

My wife is super model beautiful. I know that there is no objective basis behind this statement but she is- 1960 model that is. Find me a woman who has undergone no reconstructive surgery, whose hair color is what mother nature decrees and who turns fifty five years old in less than fifty six days and who is more beautiful than my wife and you shall show me a rare flower indeed.

Subjective statement? You bet, but by the beauty standards that are most frequently applied in the USA I think I have a strong case. And by the way, this is not a declaration about the inner her. I could enumerate dozens of faults and foibles that come part and parcel with my beloved. I call her my goddess but like the rest of us she is made of clay, it’s just that in her case the clay is physically magnificent.

And? She can’t see it.

We visited Las Vegas early this year and when I returned and climbed on my scale it read 213 pounds. “Oh, well some of that’s water weight from traveling,” I said. “Give me a couple days and I’ll be back down to where I was.” It was true. After a few days I eased back to 210 pounds, which is 21 pounds, or ten percent, heavier than I should ever be. “Just wait,” I told her, “I’ll get down to 175 this year!” I haven’t weighed one hundred seventy anything since 1990.

We haven’t seen much of each other over the last two months. We’re in the middle of relocating from Iowa to Florida and she’s been down there while I’ve been up here. I decided to surprise her by losing weight and firming up in her absence. My scale read 189 when I visited her over July fourth, ten plus pounds lighter than when she’d seen me last.

Remember when I said I could enumerate her faults? Praising me is not one of them. I had to mention my weight loss to her and she said, “Yeah. You look good.”

I look, “good.”

I praise my wife a lot: Poems, letters, caresses, attention. I tell her how beautiful she is and when I saw her in Florida she mentioned, “I don’t know what I weigh; I don’t have a scale.”

“Well you look great,” I replied, wholeheartedly stroking her physically as well as verbally.

She came up for a quick visit this past weekend and got on our scale. It read one pound heavier than when she left here mid May. Her weight increased by .65 percent, a variation that most of us experience during the course of 24 hours. “Hmm. Looks like I gained a pound,” came her melancholy response.

My wife is beautifully sculpted. Her muscle tone is scrumptious. At her current weight her body mass index is a delightful 22.4, well short of the recommended maximum of 24.9. She is a fit, lean, taut goddess and she can’t see it.